What I did on my summer vacation, part three

As with most counties in Ireland, the biggest town in the county has the same name as the county itself. So to get to County Carlow, we took a train to the town of Carlow.

We’re about an hour’s train ride out of Dublin, and it’s obvious that we’re not in the city anymore. Most New Jersey towns are busier than this. I don’t know whether that says something about Ireland or New Jersey.

We went to the Carlow library, which, unlike the National Library, put their parish records on a computer printout. It was there that one of our mysteries was solved – how Elizabeth could have started having kids at forty. Turns out the grave was wrong – She was born five years later, making her the same age at her first child’s birth as my father’s mother and my own mother. Weird.

Francis wasn’t in the book, which means he was born before the record keeping started in 1813. The grave inferred 1811, which fits. He married Elizabeth then at age 53. I have a theory that this might have been a second marriage, but I didn’t look for evidence.

Looking for similar parents in the book we found several siblings for Elizabeth – Timothy, Mary, Ellen, Catherine, and John. Siblings of Francis included Denis, Mary, Rose, and Maurice. The death and marriage records aren’t as detailed, so we found only one of these people later on, Maurice’s death in 1908. So for all we know, most of these people died as children.

Speaking of, the book revealed a great uncle my dad didn’t know he had – James, born in 1869. Obviously he had died as a child if we’d never heard of him, but to see that in there was a surprise. (When we returned to Dublin, we found out that he’d died of seizures, aged three days. The other children were four and one, so they probably didn’t remember it and the parents didn’t talk about it. Sad.)

This is where pure dumb luck comes into play.

My dad dragged me all over town, trying to find this one pub he’d eaten at three years ago. I was growing increasingly frustrated with him, since I wanted to go to another place in town to do research and he hadn’t wanted to. Dad couldn’t find the pub, so we settled into lunch at a hotel.

Where we’d wanted to go next was the cemetery that we now knew contained our ancestors. I’d written down the phone numbers of several local cab companies, but we exited the hotel to find two random cabs waiting outside. We climbed into one and showed the driver the directions to the church we’d found online.

“That’d take you 9 km out of the way!” He exclaimed. He drove up to the other cab. “Hey, Pat, can you believe these directions? They want you to take Castledermot Road!”

Turns out, the cab driver, Noel’s, son went to school at its church. He even lived in the town from where those 1940s letters came from. He had us at the cemetery within ten minutes, and told us to call his cell when we were ready to leave.

In the cemetery, Dad found the grave from the website. Finally seeing it in person solved the mystery of Thomas’s missing child. It did not say that he died in 1930 aged 31; he died in 1930 aged 3 ½. But more importantly, I found a grave with the family name that wasn’t on the website. In it were Patrick, Frank, and Luke; the three sons of Thomas mentioned in the letters. Also in that grave was a baby Padraic; this made another mystery baby, as the other grave had a baby John in it. Dad assumed they were the sons of one or two of Thomas’s sons. I mused over it. “There are three brothers here…where are their wives buried?”

Dad and I argued over where to go next. I wanted to go to the church where the actual book of parish records was kept (we’d gotten the priest’s phone number in Carlow), but Dad wanted to go to Rutland and try and track down where the farm was, even though all he had was a map from 1852. We were still debating this when the cab pulled up, but not with Noel; It was Pat, his partner. He asked about what we were looking for, and Dad happened to let the surname of the relatives slip.

“Hey, I know a Tom in Rutland!” Pat piped up. “I play football with him! He’s the only one in town, I’ll take you to his house!”

Um…what?

Sure, it was possible that he was named after who would have been his grandfather, but…was he really driving us to a stranger’s house right now?

Yes, he was, and soon we were pulling up in front of a small farmhouse. A redheaded woman came to the door when Pat knocked. Awkwardly, we named a bunch of names for her and asked if it was her family.

She said yes.

Let’s put that in perspective: My dad and I expected to find absolutely nothing about our family history when we came to Ireland and we’d managed to track down living relatives.

The woman at the door was Tom’s wife Eunice, and once realizing we were family instantly invited us in and made tea. Tom was at work. Once of her three kids managed to poke her head in the kitchen, the only blood relative I saw that day – my third cousin Ciara, the oldest at nine years old. Tom’s mother Nancy also lived with them. She was the wife of Luke, and the two babies buried in the cemetery were her children. (Like that wasn’t awkward when we found out that one.) Pat and Frank never married, we found out. Pat had died of a heart attack, and Frank in a boiler explosion accident. (Eep.)

We told them about their cousins over in America. They were obviously more interested in us, as there were a lot more of us than there were of them! But it was so weird to take out those old letters, read them out loud, and have someone sitting next to you know exactly who those people were! Yes, Thomas’s daughter Elizabeth had been a nun. Yes, the Keegan farm had been next door, but it had been sold long ago, that’s why the letters came from a different town. Marianne, Thomas’s first wife? She’d always been very sickly, that’s probably why they never had children. Yes, this is the same farm, but we had to build a new house because the old one was falling apart and full of asbestos. Would you like to see it?

Eunice walked us through their apple orchard (!!!) to reveal the house exactly as described in the census from a century ago. Of course, what do we ask first?

“Where’s the piggery?”

“Oh, we turned that into a milking station,” Eunice told us. “If it was still a piggery, you’d have smelled it from three km away!”

“Oh, so you still have cows then?”

“Yes, we have sixty cattle.”

“Um…I have a dog. Is that a cat over there?”

“Yes, we have nine of them.”

I kept asking questions of Eunice while Dad went around taking pictures of everything he could see. He picked up a clod of dirt from the ground, and announced that he was going to put it on Mary and Margaret’s grave in Queens. When Nancy saw what he had grabbed, she remarked that if he wanted weeds, there were plenty more of those he could take. Farmers, we are not.

Eunice drove us to the Tinryland church, where the priest showed us the original books. Then Noel picked us up and drove us back to Carlow, where from my Dad’s vague memories, he managed to find the pub he’d wanted to go to for lunch. Good thing he found it too, I had one of the best cheeseburgers I’d ever eaten in my life.

We were exhausted, amazed, and still slightly in shock. We’d found everything, solved all the mysteries. And we’d managed to find the one cab driver in the county at the right time to lead us to it all.

And we still had five more days in Europe!

What I did on my summer vacation, part two

In July, Dublin is about 20 degrees cooler outside than in New Jersey. I’m told they make up for it in milder winters. Even so, that didn’t placate me as I frequently tightened my sweater around me to brace against the wind. We were lucky, though. It barely rained the entire time we were in Europe, and everywhere we went, we heard about the terrible storms that had deluged them the week before.

Dad and I had arrived at our hotel around 9:30 AM, and were told that we couldn’t check in until 3:00. Tired and icky from our overnight flight, we dropped off our luggage and headed straight for the National Library. There was research to be done!

We located the microfilm to church records of what we hoped was our ancestors’ parish. All marriages and baptisms between 1813 and 1890 were on the same roll. Just as I feared, many of the pages were in illegible handwriting. Many of the pages were almost too faded to read at all. The first half of the roll was just written in haphazardly until a form was created. And yes, it was all in Latin.

I scrolled to the birth records for March 1868. And there it was. “Thoma” and “Margherita,” parents “Francis” and “Elizabeth.” And a note at the end of the page – “Thoma et Margherita sunt gemini” – they were twins. It was the baptismal record for my great-grandmother’s older siblings. We’d pinned down the first names of their parents. That was going to be a great help.

Then I scrolled down to 1878, hoping to find Mary that easily. No dice. I searched all the way backwards over the previous ten years, back to the twins. I found another sibling in 1871, and the writing was so faded that I could only identify the names of the parents. I squinted, and the first name seemed to be some latinate form of Patrick, the other brother.

We had barely been in the country a few hours, and we had already found crucial information. We knew the church parish and parents’ first names. Time to check in to the hotel and take a nap.



Now that we were sure that the tombstone transcription we’d read online before we arrived was our family, we now knew that Francis had died in 1881, and Elizabeth in 1885. This raised some questions: It said Elizabeth had died aged 60. That meant she’d had her first child at 43. Not common for 19th century Irish catholics. Even more confusing, Francis died aged 70, which meant he’d had his first child at age 57!

The next day, we walked across the city center to the National Archives, which contained microfilms of the 1901 and 1911 censuses. We wanted to know what happened to Thomas after his siblings left for America.

(After this vacation, I am now an expert at microfilm machines. Just saying.)

He’d taken over the family farm with his wife Marianne. In 1901, they’d lived in a house with stone walls and a thatched roof, two rooms and three windows in front. They had a stable, a cow house, a calf house, a dairy, and a piggery. (Dad and I spent much time giggling at the word “piggery.”) By 1911, they’d added two sheds, a fowl house, a boiling house, and another piggery!

They had no children, but Marianne’s niece lived with them in 1911. Now we had yet another mystery: The tombstone transcription said that Thomas had a son that would have been born in 1899. He didn’t show up in either census. Marianne died a couple of years after the 1911 census. The couple was well into their forties. Another Irish catholic family with no kids?! ( Hey, it’s a stereotype, but it’s what we were going by!)

We walked back across the city to the General Register’s Office, where all the civil registries were kept. Here’s how they roll: Unlike the other buildings we’d been to, this one charged you for searches. There are large index books, one for each year of the registry since 1864. Red books were for births, green books were for marriages, and black ones were for deaths. To search a five year span of one kind of book, you had to pay four euros. To have someone in the back photocopy the entry you think might be one of your relatives, it costs two euros. Of course, there was only one copy of each index book, so if someone else was using it, you had to wait. Most of the workers behind the desk were pretty lenient and let you check any book you wanted, but one bitchy lady made me put the 1878 book away when I’d paid her for 1869-1873. Grr.

Thomas and Margaret’s birth was tracked down pretty quickly (“Two for the price of one!” The worker cried with glee when I turned in the photocopy form) and it was on that form that we discovered that my great-great grandparents were illiterate – they signed the certificate with an X. I thought of checking for Francis and Elizabeth’s marriage certificate. We were in luck – they got married in 1864, the first year of mandatory registry. On the form were the names of their fathers, which we hadn’t known before. We managed to find a birth record of a Mary registered in Carlow right before the place closed, and we turned in a photocopy form before we left.

After much anticipation overnight, we returned there the next morning to find out that we had the wrong person. We then decided to search for the death records of Francis and Elizabeth. The records gave cause of death. Francis had died of prostate cancer, which he’d had for a few years with no medical attention. (If he’d had no medical attention, how’d they know it was prostate cancer? Did they do autopsies in 19th century rural Ireland?) Elizabeth had died in a mental asylum, which she had been in for a year in a half, still in depression over the death of her husband. Eep.

I decided to do a methodical search to find Mary and Patrick’s birth certificates – I searched every birth book between 1868 and 1871 and wrote down everything I found and didn’t find. It was then that we found Mary’s birth record – the one piece of information my dad needed for the dual citizenship application. She was born in 1871. She was the faded record I’d seen in the church microfilm two days earlier. I’d found my great-grandmother’s real birth year within hours of arrival, and I’d missed it! Upon returning to the library later that day, that record definitely read “Maria.”

While I was back in the library, we searched for two other things. One was a birth record of Patrick. We couldn’t find him in the civil records, and it was easier to search for free in the one roll of church records than pay to search through giant books and wait for photocopies, as we had been doing. This time, I knew to start searching in 1864, and he turned up almost instantly. Patrick was born in 1865 – he was the oldest child, which was different than what we had thought. I also scrolled to the church records of Francis and Elizabeth’s wedding – which gave the names of their mothers as well as their fathers.

Across the hallway from where I was with the microfilm machines, my dad was in the genealogy room’s computers, checking out a record of Irish land value in 1852. (Apparently the survey was so time consuming they never did it again.) There he found that Francis and Elizabeth’s families each rented farmland in Rutland. Dad tracked down a map with the farm boundaries marked off – the farms were next to each other. So my great-great-grandparents were living next door to each other, and their parents probably married them off when they realized that they were getting older. How…depressing.


There were still some questions that needed to be answered. It was time to head to County Carlow.

What I did on my summer vacation, part one

See this house?

My great-great-great-grandparents lived in it.

More on that later.

I’ve been back from Ireland a few weeks, but I’ve only gotten around to typing it up until now. So there.

My dad and I planned to spend ten days in Ireland. Our mission? Find evidence of my great-grandmother. One can get dual citizenship in Ireland if you have one grandparent that was born in the country, as my dad has.

Now one might ask, how come we never looked for this until now? Well, people have. My dad and stepmom went to Ireland three years ago and came up with nothing. His uncle and daughter went many years ago and found nothing. How were we going to find evidence on my Irish ancestors this year when the last relative to have known them, my grandmother, died over a year ago?

Here’s what we knew before my grandmother died. I decided to only include their first names. Just assume they’re all very very Irish surnames, because they are. The first names are too.

My Irish great-grandmother (Mary) was one of four children. They were from County Carlow. Three came to America (the ones that came with her were Margaret and Patrick), and one (Thomas) stayed behind. Mary and Margaret lived in Manhattan, Patrick in White Plains. Mary later moved to Queens, where she died in 1937. Margaret died in 1941. They’re buried in the same grave. The headstone says Margaret was born in 1868, and Mary in 1878. But we had reason to believe Mary was lying about her age.

Here’s what I found after my grandmother died, after I found a desk full of all her letters, which were meticulously organized by recipient:

I found an envelope labeled “Mary Kelly and Ireland.” There was one letter from 1940 or so from Mary Kelly, telling my grandmother that she’d given her and my grandfather’s address to a distant cousin in Ireland. The other letters, written during WWII, seemed to be to Mary Kelly from that cousin, and even though they were vague, they seemed to imply that Thomas, the uncle that stayed behind, had had children. One letter mentioned Frank and Pat, another Frank and Luke. Another mentioned a daughter that was a nun. These letters were from a town called Pollerton Little, in County Carlow.

Written on that envelope was a kind of family tree in my grandmother’s handwriting. It began with “Francis and Elizabeth (grandparents),” followed by “Children: Thomas and Margaret (twins), Patrick, Mary. Thomas married twice. Patrick married Margaret.” (No, Patrick did not marry his sister, I’m not including last names, remember?) The main thing about finding this envelope was that it contradicted the names of the parents listed on Mary’s death certificate. Those were listed as Thomas and Mary.

Here’s what my dad found a few months before we left:

There’s a website that lists what’s on gravestones in cemeteries in Ireland. It’s done by volunteer submission. And someone had submitted the headstones in a cemetery in Bennekerry, County Carlow, which had several of them with the surname we were looking for. One was erected by a Patrick “of White Plains, New York,” but all the other names were wrong. Another was for a Francis and Elizabeth, erected by Thomas of Rutland, and Thomas was buried there, along with his two wives. There was also a child of Thomas’s there, died age 31 in 1930, and also a baby buried in 1972. This seemed more like it, even though we had no idea where the baby came from. Rutland, Bennekerry, and Pollerton Little are all within two miles of each other, too.

Here’s what my dad and I found out within the week before we left:

My aunt had given my dad a book a few Christmases ago about finding Irish ancestry, and I read part of it. It told me that in Ireland, births were registered in parishes, and there were church parishes and civil parishes. Civil registration wasn’t required in Ireland until 1864. (Good, just in time for my ancestors to be born!) I also looked up all the places in Ireland that I could search about ancestry. I also found the website of the parish of Bennekerry, which said that before 1976, I need to be looking in the Tinryland parish. We didn’t even know if it was our relatives in that grave, but it was good to know. Also, the book told me that most of the church records back in the day were in Latin, including Latinizing most of the names. So since I was looking for a Mary, I had to search for Maria. And even then, the names might be different from what you thought they were, spelling or otherwise.

I also checked my grandmother’s birthday poster before we left. It had hung for decades on her basement door, where I stared at it from her kitchen, learning all the zodiac signs, birth stones, birth flowers, and most importantly, the birthdates of all my immediate relatives. Mary’s and Margaret’s birthdays were on it, and the more information you know, the better.

According to the book, just knowing the county your ancestors were from was a great start. We had names, approximate birthdates, and possibly the towns they lived in. And even then, we expected to find nothing.

We didn’t know how wrong we were.